“The distance that lies/between you and me/I’ll cross completely/and come before you./All of its blueness/I’ll conquer/and like a breath, swallow it,/and come/to tell you something./What shall I say?” These are the opening lines of one of Yokheved Bat-Miriam’s earliest poetry cycles, Me-Rahok (From Afar), a work that differs in form from much of her later poetry but nevertheless presages many of its themes and motifs.

To encourage her fellow prisoners in the Kaiserwald concentration camp, the young Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim recited a poem of her own composition to them every day for two years. After her arrival in Israel in 1947, she went on to publish nine books of Yiddish poetry, lyrical pieces which hint at the pain of the Holocaust yet are full of calm and comfort: the calm to be found within the natural world, the comfort to be found within friendship and love.

Born in Romania to Hungarian parents, Zsófia Balla has lived in Hungary since 1993. While in the land of her birth her work was often subject to censorship, she is considered one of her adopted nation's greatest women poets.

Since the beginning of British colonialization of New South Wales in 1788, when between eight and fifteen Jews were among the convicts who arrived with the First Fleet, several waves of immigration have brought the Jewish population up to its present size.